Is Asterisk A Linux Only System?

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I know that it runs on other systems but do other ports get the same attention? I have been running it on a NetBSD server for about a year now and while it mostly works it just crashes from time to time with no explanation or core dump.

I have improved the situation by expanding my intrusion detection but it still stops every few days or so. I have a cron job that tests for it and restarts it when necessary.

Anyone else have experience on non-Linux systems?

Cheers.

16 thoughts on - Is Asterisk A Linux Only System?

  • I have not run it on a non-Linux system, but for monitoring and restarting it when it fails, you might look into Monit. That might be more efficient than waiting for a cron job to check it and restart.

  • Why not just bite the bullet and move to a supported Linux?
    – you can be assured that it works
    – updates are tested
    – help and support is readily available.
    – only takes a few minutes to install the whole setup
    – configuration should port easily.

    There is almost no Linux administration required once it is set up so getting deep into the actual OS is not required. I have used CentOS (5.x and 6.x) for years without any problems. I have not tried it with CentOS 7 and would recommend sticking with the latest CentOS 6 for a while yet. I am converting the rest of my datacenter to 7 starting with the main firewall/router and a virtual host. Firewall is now in production but it was a bit of a learning curve for me.

    There are big differences between 6 and 7 and I would let some other Asterisk users switch before going to 7.

    Free advice and worth every cent!

    Ron

  • If all I had was a phone switch that might be an option but this is just part of a multi-server system that needs to be able to move services back and forth so the underlying OS has to be the same for everything. Besides, I am a NetBSD developer and so I am also interested in making every package rock solid on it.

    I would be willing to make a NetBSD machine (not my production server)
    available for running unit tests. Are there already unit tests in the distribution?

    Getting deep into an OS doesn’t scare me.

  • I would love to run Asterisk on a BSD system. I do not know of any developers actively working on Asterisk on a BSD platform, though my knowledge isn’t comprehensive.

    It may be worth talking to the people doing the packaging for various BSD platforms, to see how involved they are, or if they know of people developing it directly. jnemeth@netbsd for pkgsrc, madpilot@freebsd for ports/dports, and sthen@openbsd for OpenBSD ports, for example. I know you’re developing on NetBSD, but correcting for “not-Linux” would help everyone.

    —–Original Message—

  • Justin Sherrill wrote:

    I’m also unaware of anyone developing on BSD like that. Linux of course and a smattering of folks on OSX doing the odd thing.

    Cheers,

  • Asterisk needs to operate with high operating system reliability as needed and usual in the Telecom domain. Windows system don’t offer such reliability, so that’s why they are not used in any field where high reliability, security and data safety are required (like military, Government, industries, power production and distribution etc. etc.).

    If you check the top computing systems in the world, there 

    – 99.6 are running Unix/Linux systems,

    – – 97% are running Linux, 

    – – 2.6% are running Unix and only 

    – 0.2% are running Windows.

    Also using Windows’ Internet Explorer is falling down for years, being surpassed by Google Chrome and FireFox..

    It may be also due to the fact that many believes that scrappy character of Windows is a marketing trick pushing billions of users to buy again and again what they have already bought (by means of huge misleading advertising
    “buy the new version, it’s finally Super Excellent”, people buy but the known crashes, security vulnerabilities, data lost and other well known problems last – what repeats for 20 years)…

    You may remember also a big scandal with the letter by HQ to branches which called “under any cost don’t allow that Linux gets in Government sector”, offering the huge million fund for “support” of sales.. 

    Etc. etc.

    JH 🙂

  • /me is an odd developer occasionally doing odd things on OS X.

    If anyone wants to improve Asterisk on any non-Linux system, a good place to start is to run it with some of the common developer flags enabled (pass –enable-dev-mode to configure, enable DO_CRASH, enable the TEST_FRAMEWORK and run the tests).

    The increased warning level on GCC catches a few portability bugs, that are usually straightforward to fix. The tests can be harder, since you don’t know if it’s a problem in the test itself, or in Asterisk.

    Unfortunately, I doubt the Python test suite would run on non-Linux. I don’t even bother trying to run it on Ubuntu; I have a CentOS VM specifically for running the test suite to avoid platform problems.

  • Yes there are. In addition to unit tests, there are also the functional tests in the Asterisk Test Suite [1].

    To enable them as well as set up Asterisk for the Test Suite:

    1. Configure Asterisk for development mode:
    $ ./configure –enable-dev-mode
    2. In menuselect, enable the TEST_FRAMEWORK Compiler Flag
    3. Also in menuselect, enable the Test Modules. These provide the unit tests.
    4. Build/install Asterisk
    5. Run Asterisk
    6. Execute the unit tests (or a subset thereof) using the CLI:
    *CLI> test execute [category|all]

    Note that some unit tests require a particular configuration or certain subsystems to be enabled. You can examine the CI build agent scripts used for test runs here:

    http://svn.asterisk.org/svn/testsuite/bamboo/trunk/bin/

    Specifically, the “build-asterisk-only.sh” script and
    “run-asterisk-unittests.sh”.

    Setting up [2] and running [3] the Asterisk Test Suite is documented on the wiki, and generally covers a lot more functionality than the unit tests.

    [1]
    https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+Test+Suite+Documentation
    [2]
    https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Installing+the+Asterisk+Test+Suite
    [3]
    https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Running+the+Asterisk+Test+Suite

  • It runs just fine on Debian based systems. Most issues you will run into are just making sure the dependencies are set up correctly.

    It does require Python 2.6+ (recommended: Python 2.7 just in case something has slipped in that we missed.)

  • I was sure it would. But the instructions are for CentOS/EL, and I used up all of my sense of adventure just getting Asterisk running on OS X.

  • I have a package of the test suite with some of its dependencies. In managed to make it into Jessie. It still misses quite a few things.

    It would be a good start running it there.

    —
    Tzafrir Cohen icq#16849755 jabber:tzafrir.cohen@xorcom.com
    +972-50-7952406 mailto:tzafrir.cohen@xorcom.com http://www.xorcom.com

    —

  • Did that and it stopped again but still no core file and nothing in the logs. It did stay up for a whole week this time.

  • It should be noted, we did have a FreeBSD and Ubuntu systems running the testsuite back in 2010. FreeBSD was donated to the project.

    I personally had a PowerPC system running asterisk / testsuite, on debian.